Riccitiello hails 1bn gamers

With a market as disparate as video games, hard stats are always tough to come by – but EA boss John Riccitiello reckons that the global audience for gaming now stands at a massive one billion.

Conservatively, if I add up mobile users that play games, social network people that play games, people that play PC games online in Asia, all this stuff, this new audience – there's at least a billion people gaming today, compared to a couple of hundred million just five years ago,” he stated in an interview with Nightly Business Report.

We have five times the audience we've ever had and it is growing in leaps and bounds. It's no longer a niche.”